Category Archives: gardening

Joan Dye Grussow, Michael Pollan, Dan Barber …

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My love of Joan Dye Grussow‘s work, particularly This Organic Life, is well documented on this blog. Her experiences over the years growing and storing most of her own food was absolutely inspirational to me when I built my garden, and it’s still a book I go back to again and again.

This video has been kicking around the blogosphere for a while now — it’s Joan Dye Grussow, Michael Pollan and Dan Barber of Blue Hill discussing ethicurean issues and trying to figure out how to eat in ways that are good not only for their health but for the health of their communities.
What I found hilarious was Joan Grussow’s grilling of Pollan about what to eat in the winter. One of the points Pollan makes in In Defense of Food is that the western diet has turned almost exclusively to eating the seeds and fruits of plants at the expense of leaves. So, Joan Dye Grussow had taken this to heart and was saying how she’d been really trying to eat more leafy greens, but it was winter, and her garden was now frozen and what is she to do? (I was particularly amused by her wonder at how good chard was for breakfast, since my favorite Breakfast of Champions relies heavily on chard.) I’ve also written before about the prejudice against greens — they’re the food of poverty, they’re food that black people and immigrants eat, they’re slimy and weird — these are the charges. Myself, I learned to love greens in Asia — I spent a few months in Taiwan in my 20s and because they use night soil for fertilizer, you can’t really eat raw greens like salad. But I don’t recall a meal that didn’t have some sort of delicious cooked greens on the table, and I came to love all of them — spinach, tatsoi, gai lan, and a million others I didn’t actually recognize.

As for Grussow’s query about what to do in the winter — either put them up in the summer like I do, or find someone in your area growing leafy greens in the winter — Eliot Coleman has pretty definitively proven that with hoophouses and cold frames, you can grow greens even in the depth of winter in Maine. Personally, I’m all for putting up your own in the summer — it’s not hard. It does require that you spend a hot summer afternoon in a steamy kitchen blanching veggies, which can be kind of a drag. But like anything, the more you do it, the easier it gets — a quick boil in the largest stockpot, a dunk in an ice bath, a spin in the salad spinner, then put them in absorbent clean dishtowels which you roll up and twist to get the last of the water out before packaging them using the indispensable vaccuum sealer. Yeah, it means you spend a Saturday or two putting up food, but it also means that for the rest of the year you get to eat your own clean organic veggies.

I’m a little bewildered by the folks who think that seasonality trumps locavorism. Although yes, I’m eating broccoli rabe and endive and chard “out of season” in that it grew last summer, it was put up at the height of the season and there are no food miles. It couldn’t get more local. Eating my own cherries and plums all winter that I put up, instead of eating fruit flown in from Australia or Chile is, as far as I’m concerned — that’s absolutely seasonal — I’m not insisting on fresh food out of season, but rather, I’m participating in an age-old process of self-sufficiency.

It’s why it was so much fun to see Joan Dye Grussow on that video. Her book was such an inspiration to me, and seeing her in action, watching how Michael Pollan seems to defer to her a little bit as his elder, and hearing her voice which is as straightforward and slightly cranky as I’d always imagined — well, it is one of the few times I was sorry I’d left New York all those years ago — what a fun evening that must have been.

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Coolest Book Ever …

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I saw this in a garden catalog and had to have it: Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation By The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante

The Centre Terre Vivante is an “ecological research and education center” locate in Southeastern France. They publish a magazine, Les Quatre Saisons du jardin bio and apparently, this book resulted when they asked their readership to send in recipes and techniques for traditional food preservation. There are intros by Deborah Madison and Eliot Coleman, and I can’t wait to try some of these methods. I see a big stoneware pickling crock in my future and I’m particularly interested in some of the lactobacilic preserving techniques for various root vegetables. The section on root cellaring is fabulous and has given me a bunch of ideas for what to do next year. Carrots for example, growing your own carrots will ruin you for store carrots, and I’ve had trouble preserving them in the past. There’s a method that involves packing them in damp sand that I might try next year … There are instructions for drying various fruits and vegetables, as well as a fascinating method of preserving apples in dried elderberry flowers! Apparently it makes them taste like pineapple? It sounds so romantic that I might just have to try it …

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Tomatoes in my Basement

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The big news around here is that I’ve been invited on board at Ethicurean as a regular contributor — and amongst ourselves, we’ve been having a lively discussion about how sustainability, seasonality, and locality (how food miles play into the whole SOLE food equation).

For those of us who don’t live in California, or even, I’d argue the whole west coast (my stepmother gets some pretty gorgeous local produce in Seattle even in the dead of winter), the question of eating local in the winter is a vexed one. I manage to source most of my food pretty locally — I put up a lot of greens and veggies in my freezer this summer. I’ve got all those jars of cherries and plums from my garden. I’ve got a refrigerator drawer full of apples, from my neighbors’ yard actually, that have kept remarkably well. The spuds are organic and local, and when I want something fresh, there are some folks growing greens locally.

But I do buy some fresh produce that’s not local — oranges, for example. I really really want an orange with my breakfast in the winter. And so I try to buy as carefully as I can — I draw the line on food miles at North America — I’m not buying an orange that came from Australia. It just seems wrong to me on any number of levels. My other fresh produce item I can’t live without are green onions. I try to find ones from California, but often, the only ones available are from Mexico.

I also have an advantage which is that I don’t really like salad. Especially in the winter. Too cold. Too crunchy. Ick. Cooked greens, I’m all over those, but I dont’ want a salad in the winter, and keeping a garden has kind of ruined me for lettuce that’s been on a truck anyhow. Where did it come from? How many people have touched it? And don’t even get me started on those bags of organic salad leaves — if those bags are so great why does the salad always smell, in the words of my dear brother, like silage? So, for me, the no-fresh-produce-in-the-winter thing isn’t such a big deal. I don’t like salad, and I have plenty of broccoli rabe, endive, chickory, and chard from my own garden that I put up.

Tomatoes are the thing a lot of people seem to get stuck on — again, having a garden has ruined me for store tomatoes. Why bother? They don’t even taste like a tomato. I’d rather use good organic canned tomatoes than one of those bouncy things from the store. And then last weekend I remembered that I’d put up a bunch of tomatoes in October — I wrapped the last of the garden tomatoes in newspaper, and put them in the basement to get ripe. I pulled out a couple of bundles, and although some of them had gone off and had to be thrown out — there was a nice handful of little tiny Principe Borghese tomatoes, just waiting to be cut up into a nice little tomato salad with some of that basil puree I have in the freezer — it was delicious on a tartine for lunch with some leftover lamb and a little cheese (I’ve been all about tartines this winter — open face grilled sandwiches).

I realize that everyone doesn’t have the option of keeping a garden, and a lot of people don’t have room for a freezer, and it is a problem finding local produce in the north in the winter. (And no, I don’t think Alice Water’s blithe exhortation that we all just have “little hoop houses” is going to work either.) But with a little forethought, and by demanding local produce from our food co-ops and Whole Foods and even regular grocery stores, we’ll build a market, and start to have access to better local produce.

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Burdock in Paris

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The New York Times ran a piece in it’s travel section over the holidays about Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon. Buffon was, along with Linnaeus, one of the great early botanists and naturalists. Among other things, Buffon built the Jardins des Plantes — that enormous garden on the banks of the Seine. I’d never been there until my last trip to Paris when I stayed down in the 5th arrondissement — it was my last day in Paris and the sun was shining and I was getting a little lonely for green spaces and nature, so I went off to explore the Jardins des Plantes. It’s quite wonderful. There’s a small zoo, and a natural history museum, and the whole place was full of groups of French schoolchildren chattering with the joy of being sprung from school buildings and allowed to go off to see an exhibit about dinosaurs. An American girl approached me and addressed me in French about using the toilette — always a thrill to be taken for a Frenchwoman — we chatted for a minute and I made change for her so she could use the facilities.

The botanical collections are really fascinating, especially for anyone who keeps a garden. Long rows of rectangular beds separated by grassy promenades. This was late September so a lot of things had gone brown and dormant. I was poking along when I must have wound up in the collection from the Americas. I was peering at botanical labels when I came across a plant I knew all too well.

There it was, the ordinary burdock, complete with the same brown burrs that were the bane of my childhood. As a kid who spent most of my time in the woods, I was always coming home with burrs in my hair. And the ponies — my grandmother’s semi-feral ponies that lived most of the year in the pasture. Trying to get the matted burrs out of their manes seemed a nearly hopeless task. As small children, Patrick and I once got stuck in the pasture — it was late August, the burdock plants were a good six feet tall and we were stuck in a wilderness of thorns. Our grandmother rescued us, mad as hell that we were way out in the pasture where we didn’t belong instead of playing in the creek where we’d said we’d be.

And there, in the middle of this formal botanical park in Paris, was a single burdock plant, with burrs. I laughed out loud. A weed on one continent is a specimen on another.

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Frozen Dinner

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Frozen Dinner In the comments thread on Monday , the topic of frozen dinners came up. Although I relied heavily on the small-size frozen mac-and-cheese and frozen lasagnes that winter after my brother died, for the most part, the weird gumminess of frozen dinners freaks me out.

Yesterday was one of those days — I had a couple of appointments over in Bozeman in the morning and then I just never really caught up. So at six, I found myself staring into the fridge wondering what I was going to eat. I didn’t want leftover lamb and white bean stew, and although I’d thawed a piece of antelope, it was one of those nights where searing a small steak just seemed like far too much work. So I took a look in the freezer — meatloaf? Meatloaf was an idea …

I’ve written about this recipe before — it’s from Mario Batali’s Molto Italiano, a cookbook I adore — everything in it is easy, and delicious, and most important, the recipes work. This is kind of complicated for a meatloaf recipe, but it’s really yummy and it makes a very large meatloaf. Last time I made it, I had a lot left over, so I did what I often do with leftovers, and froze them in individual portions.

This meant that staring into my freezer on a blinky Tuesday night, I had a single portion of frozen meatloaf, and a bag full of cooked greens from my garden that I’d also frozen in single portions last summer. I pulled out one mystery hockey puck of frozen veg — turned out it was roma beans cooked long and slow with a little bacon, one of the delicious surprises of last summer’s garden. I plopped them both in a dish, covered the dish with foil, pulled out a small potato and poked some holes in it. Into the toaster oven it all went at 350 for about an hour while I went downstairs to my writing office and tried to get a little work done.

Frozen Dinner An hour later, I had dinner in a bowl. Meatloaf. Green beans. A baked potato.

If you’re not cooking at all yet, this might seem daunting, but if you’re a person who does cook, it really doesn’t take a lot of time to freeze things in the kind of portions that will save you on those evenings when you stand there looking into a full refrigerator thinking “there’s nothing to eat.”

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